Tag: silverlight

WPF/Silverlight Layout Gotchas

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Coming from WinForms or even older technologies like MFC, WPF and Silverlight are a revelation. A consistent framework to layout simple forms, draw graphics, add video and 3D images and animation and styling. All in the same window. Woo! But there some places where WPF and Silverlight behave differently to initial expectations and which can waste a lot of developer time or even put some off entirely from experimenting with them. Interactive Demo Most layouts in WPF use a Grid control. It’s very flexible and has a lot of powerful features. The classic demos for WPF for WinForms developers show…

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Zoom as a Primary Navigation Metaphor

Carl • • 1 Comment

Old Navigation Metaphors Scrolling Scrolling is great when you have little structure, just a list or a piece of text. In particular it’s only good if the extension is in one direction – if you only have to scroll up and down (traditional text editor or web-page display) or left and right (new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 display) but not both. For mostly text this works well because we are used to text wrapping to defined columns in books and newspapers so extending this to the computer screen left natural. But for an image or a map where you need…

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Experiments with Silverlight

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So how easy is it to take a WPF project and run it as Silverlight instead? As with so many things – it depends. OK, so the code I converted was fairly trivial and completely unrepresentative but it was interesting to see just how easy it can be, and how frustrating it can be. How things change Basic classes Exception – in .Net – Serializable, in Silverlight – not so much. So simple exception subclasses need conditional code. I wasn’t expecting problems with code quite so trivial. My approach was basically try and compile it and if it broke flip…

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